INFINITY OF INFINITIES: LIGHT, FIRE, AND AIR
In the previous post we looked at how God is both "Beyond Being" and "Being", now we look at the two senses of the "Sky": Heaven, and the "air'.
III
THE CELESTIAL WORLD
I watched till thrones were put in place, and the Ancient of Days was seated; His garment was white as snow, And the hair of His head was like pure wool. His throne was a fiery flame, Its wheels a burning fire; A fiery stream issued And came forth from before Him. A thousand thousands ministered to Him; Ten thousand times ten thousand stood before Him. The court was seated, And the books were opened.
Daniel 7: 9-10
Ibn Abi Hatim says in his commentary that ‘Allah created the Throne of His light, and the Footstool from the periphery adjoining the Throne; and round the Throne are four rivers: a river of sparkling light, a river of blazing fire, a river of white snow and a river of water, and the Angels stand upright in these rivers and glorify Allah
Frithjof Schuon [1]
When we considered the relativity of God, we said heaven is where He “dipped” into his creation. What this means is that heaven is both the “edge of creation” (according to the image where God is the outermost) and the “centre” or innermost part of creation (according to the image where God is the centre and first circle around the centre, heaven being the innermost circle of creation, the second circle in this image). It is a realm of “light”, hence why heaven is descried by catholics as the “beautific vision”, and why descriptions of it often feature bright creatures and the calling of the angels and gods “stars”. It is where John sees the “woman clothed with the Sun” (Revelation 12:1), whom the fiery red dragon opposes (and we will see that dragon in the next part). We could say heaven is the cosmic manifestation of the resurrected body of Christ, which is a “celestial body” as St. Paul put it (1 Corinthians 15:44), but is also divine because the uncreated Logos of God inhabits it. It is because of this we can imagine how in the book of the Revelation John hears the same trumpet like voice twice (Chapter 1 and 4) and look to see two seemingly different things; The voice is Christ’s, who he sees in Chapter 1, but that same voice is heaven itself calling him through that open gate in Chapter 4. These two images are one and the same reality: The Cosmic Christ as the resurrected Jesus and as Heaven itself, the house of God in whom the fullness of God dwells with his family of angels and men.
This, most properly, is where to locate Plotinus’ “Nous” or Cosmic “Intellect”, the home of the forms, the divine “Ideas”, or what Schuon called the “Supraformal” manifestations (He preferred the word “forms” for the animic and material realities).
Despite the visual language of Scripture, or rather as Scripture in its flamboyant language shows, heaven is beyond our capacity to mentally grasp. You should read how Plotinus describes the cosmic intellect to see how very difficult it is to describe the highest heaven. When scripture describes a “Tree of life”, “rivers” of pure crystal or fire, and so on, it is using figurative language to describe what realities that are pretty much impossible to fully describe with words. How many of us can easily picture the statement “Participation in divinity”? I don’t think many can without some figurative and anthropological symbolism. It is important to stress this, because you might think that this should be obvious, but you haven’t thought of the implications yet. It is because of the indescribability of heaven that we cannot take the story of the Genesis fall literally. Paradise is the intersection of earth and heaven, or rather, paradise is heaven considered as the “highest” point of “earth”, if by “earth” we mean creation itself both material and non-material. One could say in platonic terms that the “form” or “idea” of the snake is in heaven, but the forms are not the objects that reflect them on earth. The form of the snake is not a snake, it doesn’t have length, it doesn’t have blood, it simply is not a snake, and also it is not the form of the snake that tempted eve, but a snake, and the point of using that creature was not to tell us which species or “divine idea/form/god” (the forms are technically gods) caused the fall, it is to show us a symbol of something deeper in paradise.
The symbol of the snake is a symbol of deviation, or “crookedness”, it is a symbol both good and bad. Remember the tree has the fruit of “good and evil”. Remember also the symbol of the snake around a pole that is often used by medical organisations, they are the same symbol, that of a tree (straight) and a serpent (crooked). The ambivalent nature of this symbol is because deviation is in a sense the essence of creation. It is what makes creation, including heaven, what it is; it is “other than”, “different from”, or a “deviation from”, God:
All things considered, the question: “Why does evil exist?” amounts to asking why there is an existence; the serpent is to be found in Paradise because Paradise exists. Paradise without the serpent would be God. [2]
It is the “good” side of the serpent that heaven itself manifests, the side of Genesis 2, where the Adam, who represents here the divine “form/idea of man” (who is Christ by the way), himself made out of the stuff of paradise, and is paradise itself by implication, “names” all the animals he is given, that is, calls them (or their divine form) into existence. He “contemplates” their nature and through them the God who made them. It is an image heaven itself which contains and “contemplates” the forms and is in fact united with them, and therefore with the One God. It shows how the hidden essence of humanity is the centre of heaven, and it is God Himself, whom through man, creates all things. This centrality of man is seen in the Quran when it says:
When We told the angels to prostrate before Adam, they all obeyed except Iblis (Satan) who abstained out of pride and so he became one of those who deny the truth.
Surah Al-Baqarah [2:34]
At the centre of heaven is God, but also man. The one on the throne, and the lamb (Revelation 5:13). The ancient of days, and the son of man (Daniel 7:13-14). This is the man that never fell, the eternal form of man, the true first and last Adam, who is in one place Melchizedek, ruler of heavenly Salem, who is “without father, without mother, without genealogy, having neither beginning of days nor end of life, but made like the Son of God, remains a priest continually” (Hebrews 7:3) and also Christ, the king of heavenly Jerusalem who is “a priest forever according to the order of Melchizedek” (Hebrews 5:6). This “double manifestation” of the Divine man and the Human God is in another place the Trimurti of Hinduism, and here it is a “triple manifestation”. In revelation this double manifestation expanded by “rivers” and “living creature”, “angels”, and so on. This represents the multiplication of creation the farther away from the centre of heaven and from heaven itself. God is surrounded by four living creatures, further away are the seven torches, which are the seven spirits, then further away are the twenty four elders, after which are multitudes and multitudes. This is the beginning, the top, of the “mountain” of creation, which will reach down into the “air”, and then to land (earth), and to watery chaos (hell). The end of heaven, with all its “levels” and intricacies is the beginning of the “animic” or “soulish” realm, the realm of “air”, and it is from the level of the “animic” that the shadow side of the serpent, man, and woman, that of Genesis 3, begins to manifest.
IV
THE ANIMIC WORLD
And another sign appeared in heaven: behold, a great, fiery red dragon having seven heads and ten horns, and seven diadems on his heads. His tail drew a third of the stars of heaven and threw them to the earth. And the dragon stood before the woman who was ready to give birth, to devour her Child as soon as it was born.
Revelation 12:3-4
[Allah] said, "What prevented you from prostrating when I commanded you?" [Satan] said, "I am better than him. You created me from fire and created him from clay."
Surah Al-A'raf [7:12]
Wherein in time past ye walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that now worketh in the children of disobedience.
Ephesians 2:2
This realm marks the beginning of manifestation of evil. The realm itself isn’t outright evil, it is simply where evil first manifests. Evil cannot manifest in heaven, since heaven is itself the world of the forms, the intellect, which is incorruptible by the fact of its “changelessness”, or rather its participation in the divine changelessness. The animic realm is the realm of change, the beginning of “time” as we may understand it, even if “time” here still isn’t the same as the way we here experience it. It is the realm of dreams, where time still exists, but flows strangely, at least to us. It is the realm of the imagination, where the “subtle” creatures live.the realm of the faeries, the gnomes, elves, and of course, the “dragons”. It is here we find the “Spirits of nature” shamans and their counterparts refer to.
It is because it is the beginning of the realm of change (in fact its “heart”, as without it, the material world would not be) that it is called the realm of “fire”, or “air”. Fire is a phenomenon which transforms (wood to ash, ore to metal), it can symbolise time itself, the medium of change and transformation, which can be good (as in the case of turning ore into pure metal, this symbolises the man who becomes a saint), or it can be destructive (as in the case of destructive fire storms, which symbolise how time means entropy, and the eventual decay of all material things). Air on the other hand symbolises the unpredictability of change, either a restlessness or a holy invisibility. Satan is prince of the air, who, like air, moves to and fro on the earth looking for whom to devour like a hurricane. The spirit of God, in opposition, is the wind which blows where it wishes, looking for those who do righteousness, to fill them with his breath of life.
The dragon here represents the serpent in his destructive form, he tries to storm heaven, to enter he changeless realm with change, and inevitable loses. On the other had the serpent of Genesis 3 is the serpent as air, suspended between the tree and the ground, pulling creation, represented by the first couple (or in Revelation, “a third of the stars”), out into the world of change, of thorns and barren land, where the serpent itself falls. The eternal man doesn’t fall, but the man of Genesis 3 represents man’s appearance in the world of change, who, instead of conforming to the man in Genesis 1 and 2, falls into the serpent instead. This fall ends ultimately in “Hell”, the most extreme manifestation of the subtle realm as “fire”. Because of its symbolism, hell is often depicted as “under the earth”, this is because the animic “surrounds” the material, penetrating it, and giving it life, making it possible for physical phenomena to manifest, like a soul animates a body, it is not for nothing it is called the “world soul”. The material world itself is the end-point of manifestation, where man lives and is consigned to till his death, however figurative this “death” is. It is here we will explore next, with a caveat to explain how man, being the lowest here, is ultimately the highest despite the seeming superiority of the heavens.
The cover image was gotten from bibliaprints. They have some beautiful animation depicting prophetic visions in scripture
Schuon, F. (n.d.-a). Dimensions of Islam.
Schuon, F. (n.d.-c). Gnosis: Divine Wisdom.